Affinity for Opulence

Once upon a time, long before anyone ever heard of McMansions or The Osbournes, there was a quiet and highly civilized suburb of Los Angeles called Beverly Hills. In 1900 a man named Burton E. Green and several partners purchased five square miles of fertile bean fields at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains, part of a former Spanish land grant known as El Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. After unsuccessfully drilling for oil in the area, the men proceeded to develop one of the first master-planned communities in Southern California. Named by Green for Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, the city of wide curving streets, exotic trees and stately houses would become, by the time Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford set up residence in 1919, synonymous with gracious living.

Burton Green built his own estate in Beverly Hills in 1913. He had staked out a six-acre knoll above the site of the Beverly Hills Hotel and spent a few years constructing a Tudor-style mansion that the Green family called home for the next five decades. In the late '60s Burton Green's daughter sold the property to a movie-theater magnate who created his own dream house by transforming the place into a Georgian manor and furnishing it accordingly (see Architectural Digest, July/August 1971). Some twenty years later the residence was bought by a Syrian businessman who gave it another makeover (French Regency), added a third floor and hired the late designer Kalef Alaton to redo the interiors. Several years ago the businessman's widow decided the house was too large for her—and one of the last of the great Beverly Hills holdings went on the market.

The designer started with the best antiques his clients had acquired with the house and "then went about filling things in."

"I recognized the property immediately," says Geoff Palmer, who now lives there with his wife, Anne. "It's one of the four or five trophy properties in the area." A real estate developer, like Burton Green (his primary venture is building garden communities in downtown L.A.), Palmer had planned to build his own house on a large parcel he owns higher up in the hills. But his wife wanted a dog, a risky proposition in those coyote-plagued parts, and the young couple struck a deal: He would move closer to town if she found a place with enough land. A week later they were flying in from an Aspen vacation to look at a property that she'd seen in an ad. "We drove through the gate, and it looked like one of those big villas in Cap-Ferrat, with the dreamy landscaping," recalls Palmer. "I said, My gosh, how often do these things come up for sale?'" After a tense bidding war, the house with the servants' quarters so impressive that the bus-tour guides mistake them for the main residence was all theirs.

"It did take some getting used to," admits Anne Palmer, who was born in Paris and works as a family counselor in L.A. "We put all the furniture from our old house in the guesthouse and lived there while we adjusted." They also gave a lot of thought to how they would put their own stamp on the place. "We had the option of taking everything down a notch—or bringing it up," she says. You can probably guess which direction they chose. The Palmers interviewed a number of interior designers for the job, but only one arrived with his architect, a Louis Vuitton•bound portfolio and a twinkle in his eye. When it comes to bringing it up, it's hard to imagine anyone more suitable than Craig Wright.

"This house is not going to change who we are," says Anne Palmer.

"I've known that house forever," says the designer, an unreconstructed traditionalist in a town of trend mongers. "Kalef was a good friend, and he had purchased some things from our store for the house. And when the Reagans left the White House, there was a party there, and I saw the place as a guest. Of course it was very beautiful." But hardly beyond improvement. In the manner of the 1980s, everything was pale—light fabrics, white marbles, whitewashed floors. The upper floors suffered from low ceilings. And there was the matter of the appended third floor. The previous owner had enlisted the services of a discotheque designer from Madrid to fashion a true-tothe-decade boudoir, complete with disco, oversize sauna and mirror-ceilinged bedroom. "Everything rotated," quips Wright.

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Wright and his architect, Said Falati, reconfigured the third floor into a club room, media room, gentleman's bath and child's bedroom (the Palmers had a son shortly after moving in). They offset the lower room heights with classical columns and tray and coffered ceilings. And they elevated all three floors with opulent detail. Staircases were curved more elegantly and enhanced with banisters and balustrades. Walls were dressed up with boiserie inspired by various French hôtels, or clad in imported mahoganies and walnuts. Pedestrian fireplaces were replaced with rouge royale•marble chimneypieces. Casings, moldings and hardware were upgraded, all, Wright points out, in the name of "an appropriate background for fine French furniture."

Furniture, in this context, is something of an understatement. The designer started with the best antiques his clients had acquired with the house—Régence consoles from the legendary sale of Mentmore, a pair of giltwood mirrors commemorating Lord Nelson's victory over Napoleon—and "then went about filling things in." Wright joined the Palmers, who have residences in Saint-Tropez and the French Alps, on their regular spring and summer trips to France, and over three years they shopped for the finest 18th-century pieces they could find. The museum quality collection they've amassed brims with items of unique provenance—the pair of Louis XIV Boulle commodes reunited after two centuries, the Louis XVI candelabra from Pavlovsk Palace, the set of silver dinner plates made for William II, Emperor of Germany.

In the course of their travels and auction-going, the Palmers have become keen collectors: "Craig was able to nurture a dormant passion in Geoff and me," says Anne Palmer. They're particularly enjoying foiling all the ormolu and gilt with a growing accumulation of Impressionist, modern and Orientalist art. Their first acquisition, Picasso's Homme à la Pipe Assis, brings the decorous drawing room to life—"our ancestral portrait," Geoff Palmer calls it. A pair of wintry Monets hang above the rejoined commodes in the upstairs gallery; there's also a Gauguin and a Matisse.

Trophy properties have a way of creating trophy personalities, but not in this case. "We still go around barefoot," says Anne Palmer. "This house is not going to change who we are." Though they never got around to getting that dog, the Palmers' son is now three, and there are at least as many Playskool toys lying around as gold candlesticks. Geoff Palmer maintains a wine cellar stocked with Pétruses and Lafite Rothschilds ("but all drinkable," he insists), and the couple have hosted a six-course French dinner in the formal dining room and sit-down dinners for 650 outside. But they're just as happy to have pizza with friends on the roof terrace or eat with their son in the winter garden, a Neoclassical-style solarium that Wright conjured from an old plastic sunroom.

The various lives this house has led notwithstanding, its present incarnation radiates permanence. "These things have been here 300 years," says Geoff Palmer, taking in the drawing room with a sweep of his arm. "They will look this way in another 300 years. I can't imagine changing anything. I can't imagine where you go from here."

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